Back in 1931, the leaders of the four national radiology societies decided that they would unite to produce what they called an American Congress of Radiology, a joint session to be held in Chicago, where a world fair was organized as well. In those years, there were only about 1500 styled radiologists—just before many of the same leaders organized the American Board of Radiology in 1934. One of the major projects to accompany the scheduled meting in 1933 was the development of the first major history book about American radiology.
The designated editor was Otto Glasser, a physicist at the Cleveland Clinic. He had migrated from Germany. Besides his physics reputation, he was known and honored as the principal biographer of Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, discoverer of x-rays in 1895. So Otto Glasser wrote the first two chapters about Roentgen and the discovery of radium by Pierre and Marie Curie in 1898. Then he recruited 25 other authors among radiologists and physicists to add chapters on the aspects of radiology growth in 40 years.
The book was published in 1933 by the Charles C Thomas company in Springfield, IL. Several years ago, when I was rummaging through some old files, I came across that book and took it home. But I did not read it until a few weeks ago. Now I have, and it is terrific.
In the 1990s, because I was charged with organizing the radiology centennial project for 1995, I was involved with the production of three volumes—diagnosis, therapy, and physics—that recorded the history of radiology for its first century. I contributed one chapter and I have used those books as references for my own historic books and articles since then.
Just now, I have been fascinated in reading the Otto Glasser collection “The Science of Radiology” dating up to 1933. There is much duplication between the Glasser book and the centennial volumes. But to my delight, the 1933 book contains more emphasis on the first 40 years and has much more information about the early developments of x-rays in Germany, Britain, France, Austria, and other parts of Europe.
In Glasser’s chapter about Roentgen, he explains how physicists in Europe had been experimenting with electricity and vacuum tubes and what happened with electric currents injected into exhausted glass tubes. Many physicists were experimenting. But they did not recognize that they were generating invisible x-ray beams caused by the collision of the electric current on the glass wall of the vacuum tube. It was Roentgen, in his German laboratory in November 1895, who activated his tube and noticed across his laboratory a flickering light on a cardboard tube coated with barium platinocyanoide. Somehow, there was a beam emerging from the vacuum tube and crossing the room to the plastic tube. In a matter of weeks, Roentgen proved that the electric tube generated those invisible rays. When he held something between the electric tube and the cardboard, he could see shadows. He could see the bones of his hand, minus the flesh. He called the energy x-rays. A few weeks later, when he had demonstrated that the x-rays would expose glass photographic plates, he made an image of his wife’s hand, showing her bones and her rings, also without the flesh. So then he wrote his first article. It was published at the end of 1895 and a week later, a newspaper in Vienna, Austria, carried the first public account of Herr Professor Roentgen’s discovery. The story was published in North American newspapers. And any physicist reading the story could go into his lab, connect electric current to a vacuum tube, and make a beam of x-rays. Within the same days, some doctors speculated that x-rays could show changes in human bodies—“bullets, bones and kidney stones,” as one writer described it. In 1896, more than 1000 articles about the newly created x-rays were published in American scientific magazines.